this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
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Im noticing its harder and harder to find things on google. Searching for a companies quarterly profits, cost of medical care for all per capita, and othet economic details are all getting more and more buried in google. Just asking how other contries do their social programs results in us based opionion articles....like wtf are we even doing.

I understand scrolling and indexing sites is an enormous undertaking. Is there currently a federated open source search engine? If not is their a potential to create one?

Is there a trustworthy private option?

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[–] squinky@lemm.ee 6 points 17 hours ago

This probably doesn’t help immediately, but I’ve been working on a platform that does federated search (among other things) for the last year. It’s in private friends-and-family testing and won’t be available for general use for at least a couple more months.

I haven’t even decided on a name yet, but I promise to make a lot of noise about it once it’s in public beta

[–] i_am_not_a_robot@feddit.uk 5 points 22 hours ago

Maybe Stract?

It's open source and has its own search index.

[–] rumschlumpel@feddit.org 30 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

There is SearXNG, it's open source and decentralized but AFAIK the different instances don't really share information between them. I'm personally interested in trying it, but I'm apprehensive about the fact that it's really hard to know whether a particular instance is trustworthy, and while it's possible I don't think it makes much sense to host it myself.

https://searx.space/

[–] vividspecter@lemm.ee 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I'll add that it's a meta-search engine rather than something that does the actual searching itself. That's still useful, but you're limited by the quality of the upstream search engines (including google, duckduckgo, qwant, etc).

The gain from self-hosting is that you have more control over the results, and can do things like redirect social media sites to privacy friendly alternatives, and create your own bangs (or even add your own custom search engines).

Probably not a massive privacy gain though, although if you host the instance behind a privacy VPN queries won't be associated with your IP at least.

[–] gedaliyah@lemmy.world 7 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Does DDG really generate its own searches? I was under the impression that it uses the Bing API. Maybe that's outdated or only applies to certain types of search?

[–] vividspecter@lemm.ee 1 points 1 hour ago

I think there is some postprocessing but yeah it uses Bing. I simply meant that SearXG uses its results (and Bing too for that matter). So it's layers all the way down.

[–] cerement@slrpnk.net 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] mac@lemm.ee 1 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Just an FYI, but this domain appears to be on HaGeZi's Badware Hoster Blocklist

Edit: ah, I see now. Its a free webhost so there may be badware hosted elsewhere on it

[–] breadguy@lemm.ee 24 points 1 day ago (4 children)
[–] kambusha@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Seems to be using searXNG. Routes the search query to different instances

[–] breadguy@lemm.ee 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

yes, lot of folks dont know where to start with searxng so this is nice and simple and just works

[–] funbun@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

Awsome thank you!

[–] Nemo@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This is actually super cool.

[–] breadguy@lemm.ee 5 points 1 day ago

I gotta shout out trom when I can, they're doing great work

[–] Varyk@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago

wow, thanks for sharing, that's awesome

[–] thefactremains@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago
[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

There is yacy
It's not the most accurate but you can help by adding a server or client to the mix.

[–] phanto@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago

I've taken a couple of shots at yacy, but have little luck. It's possible to self host a searxng in docker that uses almost no resources. I use a server, but a buddy literally has it load on startup in his Windows.

[–] funbun@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Ill give this a shot! Thanks for the recommendation!